Photo Effects

About the Photo Effects

Pick an effect from the strip — cartoon, oil paint, watercolour, comic, posterize, emboss or glitch — and see it on your own photo, then shape it with the effect’s sliders and blend it with the original using Effect strength. Compare before and after with the split view, or check the details in the 100% and 200% views.

The effects are classic image-processing filters, not generative AI: every pixel comes from your photo’s own colours, edges and brightness. They run on your graphics chip with WebGL 2 (or on the CPU when WebGL 2 is unavailable) at the full resolution of the photo, and the same settings can be applied to many photos and downloaded as a ZIP. Nothing is uploaded.

Common uses

• Profile pictures and thumbnails with a cartoon, comic or pop-art look
• Painterly prints and greeting cards from holiday photos
• Posters and flyers with posterized or halftone images
• Album covers and social posts with a glitch look

How each effect works

• Cartoon smooths the photo with a separable bilateral filter (Pham & van Vliet), which flattens texture but keeps edges, then rounds brightness to a few tones with the soft quantisation of Winnemöller, Olsen & Gooch (Real-Time Video Abstraction), and inks outlines where a difference of two Gaussian blurs is strong.
• Oil paint uses the anisotropic Kuwahara filter of Kyprianidis, Kang & Döllner: around each pixel it looks at an ellipse stretched along the local edge direction, splits it into eight sectors and takes the colour of the calmest ones, so areas turn into strokes that follow the shapes. Brush texture is noise smeared along the same directions and lit like raised paint.
• Watercolour simplifies the photo into washes, wobbles their edges, and varies the amount of pigment with turbulence, pigment dispersion, paper grain and darker edges, using the pigment-density formula of Bousseau, Kaplan, Thollot & Sillion: C′ = C − (C − C²)(d − 1).
• Comic combines smoothed flat colours, ink lines and halftone dots whose area follows the darkness. CMYK halftone prints cyan, magenta, yellow and black dots on screens turned 15°, 75°, 0° and 45°, as in offset printing.
• Posterize rounds each colour channel (or only the brightness, keeping the hues) to the number of levels you choose; dither uses an 8 × 8 ordered (Bayer) pattern between the bands.
• Emboss lights the blurred brightness of the photo as if it were a surface: slopes facing the light come out brighter, slopes facing away darker.
• Glitch shifts horizontal slices sideways (wrapping around), separates the red and blue channels, corrupts a few blocks, and adds scanlines and noise. New random pattern picks another arrangement.

Why the preview matches the saved file

Every size in the effects — brush, dots, line width, slices — is defined relative to the picture, so the screen preview, the 100% view and the saved file show the same look whatever the resolution. The graphics chip processes large photos in tiles with an overlap wide enough for the effect, so the tiles join without seams; the CPU version follows exactly the same steps, so its result matches to within rounding.

Limitations

• These are filters, not AI: they restyle your photo’s own colours and edges and do not redraw faces or add details.
• Photos up to 50 megapixels. Metadata such as EXIF and colour profiles is not copied; colours are saved as sRGB.
• Without WebGL 2 the effects run on the CPU: they look the same but are much slower, especially oil paint on large photos.
• The glitch on the graphics chip needs whole rows: pictures wider than the chip’s texture limit (usually 8192 px or more) are processed on the CPU.
• Transparent areas keep their transparency (glitch slices move it too), but the effects are designed for photos rather than logos.

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